Sumayyah B. – Hand on Heart

I’m not sure whether the hands are forcing their way into a bleeding heart or are keeping it held together. For me, the piece as a whole is about intimacy and distance.
I created a collage of various magazines that were laying around Arty-Folks studios, notably 90s National Geographics and 2010s beauty and fashion magazines. Combining these two genres was interesting! I tried to include a lot of rawness like the jaguar’s open mouth and the bloody carcass making up part of the right hand strawberry.

I think magazines give a very interesting way of view the world, as does all pop culture. There’s a mundanity as well as an oversaturated fakeness to them, a carefully curated presentation of the cultural heritage at the time.

The clippings of words throughout the piece I have picked because they resonated with me. “I’m sorry, I don’t have any problems” I think sums up my artwork as a whole. No one truly has no problems, but a lot of us want other people to think we don’t. It’s forcibly creating distance and not completely letting the viewer in.